But what gave the Internet its disruptive power and exhilarating appeal was that it was barely owned

Jonathan Krim, Washington Post

Suddenly, the mom-and-pop store in Des Moines could advertise and sell to the world, without paying the freight of someone else's marketing apparatus. Intellectual and artistic works could be shared rapidly, at little or no cost. Games could be created and distributed without ever having to manufacture a physical item.

We may think of it as the information superhighway, but really the Net has been a gigantic bypass, circumventing barriers to entry and whole swaths of middlemen (think travel agents or, I'm sad to say, newspaper owners) who are now trying to figure out how to survive.

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